Update from the TRaining Shop

Jason Ferguson

Jason Ferguson is an interdisciplinary Emergency Management professional who has worked within the Public Health, Emergency Management, and Higher Education sectors. He is a certified ICS instructor with the ability to relay incident management concepts with organizational relevance. Jason leads the Training Team as they develop a comprehensive program for training TR volunteers for mission success.

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Over the past six months, the TRaining Shop has grown from a one-man band to a team of four employees with support from regional training officers, and the new team hit the pavement running. Among the lengthy list of to-dos, we set our priorities on strengthening our national training program by:

Raising up cadres of certified instructors from among our member base to empower regional training execution

There’s tons of exciting stuff up ahead as a result of this work. We’re cheering on our regional teams as they land us opportunities to participate in regional and national exercises. Events like those listed below allow us to actively build relationships with strategic disaster response partners and simultaneously put our systems and core response capabilities to the test.

Trigger MOBEX is a large-scale mobilization exercise, training event, and service project hosted as a joint effort between Team Rubicon Region VII and Habitat for Humanity from March 28-April 3 in Nebraska. This event will expose new members to what a TR operation is like from the initial mission planning process all the way through demobilization. Training such as chainsaw, heavy equipment, and Palantir Technologies will be offered, and a team service project will be completed during the exercise.

Patriot Exercise is a national full-scale exercise in Wisconsin sponsored by National Guard Bureau for domestic response, and Team Rubicon will play a critical role by providing Incident Management Team support as well as field-based response support through damage assessments, and chainsaw and heavy equipment operations.

Vigilant Guard Exercise is a full-scale exercise coordinated by the Vermont National Guard and Vermont Division of Emergency Management and Homeland Security on July 29-August 1. TR will be exercising its response capabilities in the areas of operational planning, coordination, and damage assessment during a catastrophic event in partnership with local, state, and federal entities.

Expect to hear more about these opportunities in the coming months. In the meantime, get yourself ready to support the team down range by making sure that you have utterly crushed your pre-deployment training.